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Cry Anzac and let slip the metaphors of war

Liz Porter is dismayed as Anzac Day's solemnity is hijacked as a football motivational tool.

ANZAC Day is looming and so too the "traditional" Essendon-Collingwood clash. Time for the annual avalanche of offensive bunkum, in which the on-field heroics of a group of highly paid and pampered male athletes will be conflated with the genuine heroism of many thousands of Australian men who literally  and fatally  "put their bodies on the line" in a series of terrible wars.

I write this in sorrow because I adore AFL football. I go to see my beloved Saints every week and also enjoy watching other teams play on television. I love reading about the game and listening to the "experts" analyse it on the radio. I even stay up late on Monday nights watching Footy Classified.

But I have just learned that an Anzac week visit to the Shrine of Remembrance is the latest "motivational tool" for AFL football coaches. While some comic is sure to seize on this for a stand-up routine, I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

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Next week three AFL teams  Melbourne, Essendon and the fledgling Gold Coast outfit  will be touring the shrine and visiting its sport and war exhibition. Last year Collingwood made a pre-game visit to the shrine  and won the game. So I guess the others want to get in on the act. Essendon's visit will be filmed to provide appropriate

war/football images for the Anzac Day game's TV audience.

The commodification of "the Anzac spirit" as an AFL marketing device appears to have begun with the 1995 Essendon-Collingwood clash, after which a commemorative poster of the game was produced, bearing the words "Lest we forget". A solemn pledge was reborn as an advertising slogan.

Significantly, 1995 was also the year that trail-blazing player manager Ricky Nixon kicked off the commodification of the players themselves, taking the AFL to court to wrest back players' rights to their own names, images and signatures and launching "Club 10", a marketing symbol indicating endorsement by his 10 top player clients.

Now the marketing of the "Anzac tradition" of mateship is an established feature of the media landscape, even making its way into a recent beer ad. Meanwhile, the sports writers have been happy to play along and let loose the purple prose of war. Anzac week sports coverage now bristles with references to "football's bravehearts" and "mateship"

and "Anzac spirit". One article

even likened eminent retired players to "true Anzacs (that)

have departed down the years".

Who started this nonsense? Did I miss the day when some signal was given for us to start looking back at the two world wars as if they were some some kind of giant Australian bonding exercise? Even the Australian War Memorial is in on the act, with its website talking up the exhibition now showing at the shrine stating that "sport and war (are) two key factors in our culture and national identity" and pointing to "shared ideals of sport and war  teamwork, physical prowess, loyalty and leadership".

You can't just cherry-pick the aspects of war that you choose to celebrate. The First World War, the "war to end of all wars" crippled an entire generation. Of an Australian population of fewer than 5 million, more than 400,000 men enlisted, with 60,000 of them killed and 156,000 wounded, gassed, or taken prisoner. In one hellish 24 hours of trench warfare, at Fromelles, on the Western Front, 5533 Australians were killed, wounded or taken prisoner. In the disastrous Gallipoli operation, 8141 young Australians were sent to their deaths  for no strategic military gain. Men returned from both that war, and its bloody 1939-45 sequel, broken in body and mind.

It's significant, I suppose, that the current sentimentalised view of Australia at war takes place in an era where only a small minority of professional soldiers are in any danger of actually fighting in one.

Back in the days of conscription for the Vietnam War, young men in their late teens didn't seem burdened by the need to travel to Gallipoli and attend a dawn service wrapped in an Australian flag. Or should we blame the fact that that splendid 1960 play One Day of the Year, a great stimulus for cynicsm about Anzac Day in the young, is no longer regularly studied in schools?

Once again this week, we will hear the widespread and unquestioned use of the word "Anzac" on the lips of footballers and footy commentators. There'll be bombast about "standing up for your mates" and "heroes" and "battlefields" and interviewers asking players about the motivation they gained at the shrine. And not enough people will be snickering, and suggesting that the bravest thing many footy players have done is to be rude to a nightclub waiter.

So please, guys, just go back to the tried and true cliches of sport. Give us more whiteboard wisdom about selflessness and mantras such as, "There's no 'I' in team". And please, please, please, just take your hands off the metaphors of war.